Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire when you hate HP printers, alternatives??

Just looked at some Brother laser printers online. Seem fine until you get to the fine print where they require a monthly subscription billed automatically or they disable the printer. Nope.

We just threw away our third HP, and now have a Canon, (PIXMA) which so far actually prints from our desktop, and phones.

Funny,my HP is on the fritz right now.
Been trying to figure what to get to replace it.

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We've been running Brother laser printers for years and have never run into this nonsense.
In fact, using generic toner cartridges, it seems like printing for free, compared to inkjets.

Had a color laser jet 2695dn just for household use and it quit the red shades due to some dust or dirt on a sensor or lens somewhere in the heart of the machine. Seems near complete assembly is needed to rectify things and without knowledge of how/where all the clips, snaps, latches and hinges are to be found, I'd probably wreck some component if I ripped into it. I found a pdf on how to do the job and it sounded like about a full day effort. HP would not service it themselves, so it's parked and replaced with a tiny Epson ET-3760. Need to pack the HP off to some recycling center. The Epson is OK but does not generate what I'd consider publication quality.


Use high end HP units at work and they do a beautiful job. Those, however, get a couple thousand bucks of service on an annual basis.

If you opt for an inkjet, get a tank type. There are a number of good ones on the market. I have a Canon Pixma 6020 that works very well and uses no expensive cartridges. Just refill the tanks with cheap ink as needed.

HP or Lexmark laser.

Brothers printers work and won't break you.

^^ x2

Consider ink refill kits from someone like inkowl. They sell their own refillable cartridges, but also, you can refill existing cartridges with ink they sell by drilling a hole and taping it off.

I just bought a canon with the ink tanks. I holds a LOT of ink.

Btw, a complete set ink bottles, contains 3 colors and 2 black inks, sells for $21 on Amazon. I bought this spare set and am nowhere near ready to use them yet.

I currently don't have an HP printer, but some of the older ones had the default setting where it used the color cartridge to make black ink. That was the default. You had to change it to a setting where when it printed black, it used the black cartridge. miles

We went through the same deal. The HP cartridges seem to be lasting less and less. The printer works great but having to shell out 60 bucks for a 2 pack cartrige every 3 months was stupid. One one trip to staples a year ago to get another cartridge pack I looked at printers and bought a Cannon ink tank for $230. Still on the original ink and prints just as good as the HP. It's already paid for itself.

I just got an Epson ET-2400 last week. I was wondering about the ink gunking up in them as I don't need to print that often and most of that is black & white. I will try and remember to run a test page every week. Thanks for the tip.

Brother laser is the ONLY answer

I went Laser Jet to get away from the ink jet issues.

Went to using a Brother printer and NEVER looked back.

Yep, process black. Send a print job with any color and the machine uses process black.

That was always a issue with billing, customer complains about all the color "clicks" they're billed saying we never run color jobs. That b/w print job had a few color pixels somewhere....so the box counts it as color. Some professional (production) machines could differentiate and "grade" the job.

Most print drivers have a toggle setting somewhere for b/w only.

Most printers are like that. They mix the colors for black when printing in color and only use the black ink when you switch to to black or grayscale. As a result, my Canon tanks use very little black. The bottles are cheapest in sets and always come with black. I have 3 or 4 extra black bottles now.

HINT: If you don't print a lot, the heads can dry up and get clogged. On the Canon tank printers, the heads are easy to clean but you have to buy a cleaning kit. Prevention is better. Find a large full color photo and save it where you can print it easily. About once a week, print it both in color and in black and white. That will give the heads a good sloshing out.